She shut the door on her thoughts.  That was sacred ground.  But it was a shame that——­

She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots.

After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch by mosquitos, when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth time in five years commented, “We must have a new screen on the porch—­lets all the bugs in,” they sat reading, and she noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again his habitual awkwardness.  He slumped down in one chair, his legs up on another, and he explored the recesses of his left ear with the end of his little finger—­she could hear the faint smack—­he kept it up—­he kept it up——­

He blurted, “Oh.  Forgot tell you.  Some of the fellows coming in to play poker this evening.  Suppose we could have some crackers and cheese and beer?”

She nodded.

“He might have mentioned it before.  Oh well, it’s his house.”

The poker-party straggled in:  Sam Clark, Jack Elder, Dave Dyer, Jim Howland.  To her they mechanically said, “’Devenin’,” but to Kennicott, in a heroic male manner, “Well, well, shall we start playing?  Got a hunch I’m going to lick somebody real bad.”  No one suggested that she join them.  She told herself that it was her own fault, because she was not more friendly; but she remembered that they never asked Mrs. Sam Clark to play.

Bresnahan would have asked her.

She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the men as they humped over the dining table.

They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting incessantly; lowering their voices for a moment so that she did not hear what they said and afterward giggling hoarsely; using over and over the canonical phrases:  “Three to dole,” “I raise you a finif,” “Come on now, ante up; what do you think this is, a pink tea?” The cigar-smoke was acrid and pervasive.  The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing.  They were like politicians cynically dividing appointments.

How could they understand her world?

Did that faint and delicate world exist?  Was she a fool?  She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air.

She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the house.

Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man.  At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with food—­the one medium in which she could express imagination—­but now he wanted only his round of favorite dishes:  steak, roast beef, boiled pig’s-feet, oatmeal, baked apples.  Because at some more flexible period he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an epicure.

During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from gun-cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated the thing.